We’ve written before about why we won’t quote a project on the first call — discovery is where the real number comes from. But discovery is a two-way exercise: the quality of the blueprint depends on what you bring into the room. Here’s how the clients who get the most out of it prepare, in about two hours of homework.

Bring the people who do the work

The single biggest predictor of a good discovery is who’s in the room. Owners know the strategy; the person who processes orders every day knows the seventeen exceptions the strategy doesn’t cover. When we built a warehouse system, the floor team’s answers shaped the design more than the org chart did. Invite the doers, and tell them honestly that the goal is to remove the annoying parts of their job — not their job.

Collect the artifacts, not just opinions

Before the workshop, gather the things your process actually runs on: the spreadsheet everyone updates, a sample invoice, the email template you send customers, screenshots of the systems you use, last month’s “weekly report” someone assembles by hand. Real artifacts beat descriptions every time — they show us the data you track, the steps nobody mentions, and the workarounds that have become invisible to you.

Write down the top three pains, ranked

Not features — pains. “We can’t tell customers where their order is.” “Quoting takes two days.” “Month-end reporting eats a week.” Discovery will translate pains into features and rank them by value; your job is to be honest about which problem, if it vanished tomorrow, would matter most. Disagreement inside your team about that ranking is not a problem — surfacing it in the workshop is precisely the point.

Decide what “working” would look like

Come with a number attached to the pain wherever you can: hours per week re-typing, calls per day about order status, orders lost to slow quotes. Those numbers become the yardstick the finished software is measured against — and they’re how you’ll know, a year later, whether the project paid for itself.

What you’ll walk away with

From our side: a requirement document in plain language, wireframes of every screen, a feature set ranked by business value, and a price built on all three. It’s yours to keep whatever you decide — which is exactly why we want you to come prepared. A blueprint is only as good as the building it describes.